Rocket League Championship Series Pulls in 18 Million Hours of Live Twitch Viewership in 2018

Since launching back in July 2015, Psyonix’s Rocket League has built up an impressive esports following, and it consistently does well in our Twitch ranking. According to our Game Streaming Tracker, the Rocket League Championship Series (RLCS) had its best year yet, boasting 18 million hours of live viewership on Twitch in 2018. Keep reading for a deep dive into the league’s performance this year, as well as insights into the RLCS Season 6 World Championship, which helped Rocket League secure a position in our ranking for November’s most viewed games on Twitch (by live esports hours). As always, we’ll end by looking at the other games in our Twitch and YouTube Gaming top 10s.

RLCS Had Its Best Year Yet for Live Viewership on Twitch

Following the successful RLCS Season 6 World Championship last month, 2018 is now the league’s best year for live Twitch esports viewership—up 28.2% from last year (18.0 million vs. 14.1 million hours).

The league’s top Twitch channel, of course, was the official Rocket League channel, with 18.0 million hours of live viewership—compared to 13.7 million last year (year-on-year growth of 30%).

The Rocket League Twitch channel has also had 46.1% more average concurrent viewers this year (50K for 2018 vs. 34K for 2017).

RLCS Season 6 World Championship Was a Success on Twitch

Our Game Streaming Tracker shows that the RLCS Season 6 World Championship, which took place from November 9 to 11 in Las Vegas, generated 1.9 million hours on Twitch.

The vast majority of this viewership came from the official Rocket League Twitch channel.

These impressive numbers helped Rocket League secure the #7 spot on our Twitch ranking for November’s most watched games (by live esports hours).

This marks the sixth time Rocket League earned a spot on the Twitch top 10 this year.

Last year’s equivalent of the event (RLCS Season 4 World Championship), however, generated more live viewership hours: 2.7 million hours vs this year’s 1.9 million. This was expected, as the Season 4 World Championship was broadcast for twice as many hours.

Again, the Rocket League Twitch channel accounted for the bulk of these viewership hours last year (2.6 million).

What’s more, the average concurrent viewer number for Rocket League’s official Twitch channel was 56K during 2017’s Season 4 World Championship and 91K during 2018’s Season 6 edition—that’s year-on-year growth of +63.1%.

Dota 2 Takes the Twitch Top Spot

Twitch’s most watched game by live esports hours was Dota 2, rising two spots from the previous month. The title jumped four places to hit #3 on the YouTube ranking. This is no surprise, as the popular Kuala Lumpur Major took place from November 8 to 17.

League of Legends held on to its top spot on YouTube Gaming but dropped 2 places to #3 on Twitch. Meanwhile, CS:GO maintained its #2 position on both rankings.

The biggest riser on Twitch was Overwatch, jumping an impressive 10 spots to #4. This is due to the finals of the Overwatch World cup, which took place at BlizzCon 2018.

Rainbow Six: Siege re-entered the Twitch top 10, rounding off the list at #10. The title also fared well on the YouTube ranking, on which it jumped two spots to #4.

On the Twitch top 10, Magic: The Gathering climbed one spot to #9. Magic: The Gathering Arena, the focus of October’s PC Game Tracker post, remains one to watch in esports, following the news that Wizards will invest $10 million into the game’s competitive scene.

Newzoo’s Game Streaming Tracker

Looking to track the world’s most viewed games, identify top streamers, or pinpoint esports heroes? Newzoo’s Game Streaming Tracker offers the most comprehensive overview of the game-streaming market. Updated daily, the tracker includes instant insights on the number of hours watched, hours broadcast, and the average number of viewers for various metrics, such as games, esports broadcasters, streamers, publishers, and genres.

Uniquely, games and channels are tagged according to their genres and publishers, while content is flagged as esports using machine-learning algorithms. Esports channels are then manually tagged and consist of channels that stream exclusively esports content. For YouTube, only the top 100 channels for each game within a given time are taken into account.

We built the tracker to provide users new to the space with immediate insights and context while giving experienced game-streaming experts the ability to drill down into granular insights.

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